Driving Blind: Long Lost Books and University Crooks

A segment at NPR outlines the fight in Texas to transform the state university system. Governor Perry and private sector elites want to make higher education in the state more affordable and efficient, while a coalition of alumni associations, state legislators, and faculty resist.

It might be dead in the Senate, but I find the legislation to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and allow workers to swap overtime pay for up to four weeks of paid time off per year particularly pernicious. Republicans argue that the bill provides worker flexibility, and that it forbids employer coercion—but I’m still unconvinced that if these changes were to take place workers would have MORE power rather than less.

“Meanderings of Memory, by one “Nightlark”, is dated to 1852 by the OED, and appears in 51 entries for the dictionary, including “couchward”, “extemporize” and “fringy”. Veronica Hurst, the OED’s principal bibliographer, said its shadowy existence was discovered when a member of staff was working on the entry for “revirginize”, for which Meanderings of Memory is the earliest citation. The quotation taken from the book for the OED is: “Where that cosmetic … Shall e’er revirginize that brow’s abuse.” But Meanderings of Memory could not be traced in any library catalogue or database, so Hurst was contacted; she expected to track the book down within 10 minutes.”

Lawrence Rosen reviewsOn the Muslim Question by Ann Norton. The verdict? Norton criticizes the clash of civilizations thesis but offers no alternative, “we may avoid the “clash”, but it may come at the cost of an arrangement neither community should be eager to call “civilisation.”

Tim Cushing notes the chilling of relations between EA, one of the largest video game publishers, and gun manufacturers. EA, a company with several military shooter franchises, still plans on using famous guns in its games, but will not longer pay licensing fees.

And finally, Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby opens this weekend. Delayed for a year, and now critically and popularly panned, I’m curious to see just what has everyone so jaded. Perhaps it takes the refined sense of irresponsible indulgence only us millennial can muster to truly appreciate Luhrmann’s anachronistic spectacle. Jesse Fox at Vulture has a great rundown of everything everybody’s saying. My favorite,

“Luhrmann doesn’t just gild the lily, he spray-paints it with glow-in-the-dark sparkles.”

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I write about comics, video games and American politics. I fear death above all things. Just below that is waking up in the morning to go to work. You can follow me on Twitter at @ethangach or at my blog, gamingvulture.tumblr.com. And though my opinions aren’t for hire, my virtue is.

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A segment at NPR outlines the fight in Texas to transform the state university system. Governor Perry and private sector elites want to make higher education in the state more affordable and efficient, while a coalition of alumni associations, state legislators, and faculty resist.

….uhhhh.

What?

No, what Perry and co. are trying to do is basically gut the ability of state research universities (which UT-Austin is one) from functioning and turn them into diploma mills. Now maybe that’s considered “more efficient” in some strange world, but in terms of the overall value of the system? Not on your life.

Freddie recently had a post about Purdue University’s $100 Million gym upgrade.

Perhaps Purdue is not, in fact, representative of anything at all but, if it is?

There’s fat in the budget to cut. Given that these costs are eventually borne by students, I think it’s a good idea to provide them an option with a cheaper university experience. There’s a lot of Liberal Arts that don’t require much more than a handful of books and an impassioned professor with tenure in charge of a handful of TAs to teach about them. That’s something that is a lot less expensive, over the long run, than $100 million dollar rec rooms.Report

Whenever I spend time at a university, I’m amazed at how expensive everything looks.

a.) Grounds like a golf course b.) New and renovated (if often ugly) buildings c.) So much computer equipment and TV’s and projectors d.) Student centers and gyms and food courts that are nice e.) Admin buildings filled with people who look like (and drive cars like) they make 6 figure money

Future universities could save so much money by just doing the following:

This univeristy will have one, simple building (it will be a smallish univeristy). The building will likely become a bit old and dingy over time. Deal with it. (Nicer than what Plato had.) This university will not have food courts, gyms, Olympic swimming pools, sports teams. etc. and it won’t have a grounds at all. Students can bring their own lunch. We will try to attract private food trucks. This university will not pay any administrator more than 80,000, (inflation adjusted), unless they are special professions needed (lawyer, CPA). Low level administrators will make modest salaries. The university will team with other universities to share as much administrative cost as possible. This university will have professors share office space in most cases. This university will not have its own police force. All professors (except emeritus profs teaching a class or two) will teach a 3/4 schedule with no exceptions, even for sabbaticals, unless they bring in outside funding, or unless they are doing serious administrative work, like being chair. The university will not have its own psych services or free career counselling. This university will not pay for marketing This university won’t have computer labs. This university won’t have a physical laboratory space or library space. Students will be asked to use existing public libraries for many courses.

The university will attract students by offering top level professors, but charging less for tution than lots of other schools.Report

I went to a school like this. I managed to pay for it as I went, by having a job at the same time. Now, yes, I was lucky (privileged!) enough to live at home at the time, but, still, I got a good degree (well, a philosophy degree anyway) from a good state school that cost me only about 6 grand a year (3 grand a semester).

Taking inflation into account, I don’t know why they couldn’t do this same thing for 8 grand a year.

I’m not saying *ALL* schools need to do this. Purdue can be Purdue. But there should be a state school option that offers bare bones liberal arts educations for rates that won’t break your back when you graduate with a degree in the liberal arts, of all things.Report

We have those schools here in Texas. Also as part of being the ‘fat’ being cut…well I don’t have much kindness to offer Mr. Perry who collects both a state pension AND a salary for being a marginally incompetent governor.Report

Texas has a fair number of non-research public universities. These range from the regional schools of the “University of Texas” to independent public universities like Stephen F. Austin State University.

In-state tuition in most of these institutions is in the area of 4-5000/semester, which are quite reasonable.

There’s simply no need to gut the research focus and tier 1 status of UT-Austin to add “affordability” to the Texas public university system.Report

Interestingly, I did some looking up of tuition rates at Texas schools and undergraduate at UT-Austin itself is actually under $5000 a semester, according to Collegeboard. $9,792 per year.

Which is actually comparatively quite inexpensive. The non-research schools are a little cheaper, but the difference is not great. The least expensive school I found in Texas was UTEP ($7k or so), which actually is a research school.

Texas (as a state) appeared to be below-average, cost-wise, which is a little bit like talking about the highest building in Fargo. It’s all remarkably expensive.

As I said below, I think it’s a mistake to tinker with Texas’s flagships (UT and A&M in particular), though I still like the idea of an inexpensive alternative like WGU-Texas, or expanding community colleges to four years with it made explicit that the primary goal is to remain affordable and not try to compete with the more traditional universities.Report

“It might be dead in the Senate, but I find the legislation to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and allow workers to swap overtime pay for up to four weeks of paid time off per year particularly pernicious. Republicans argue that the bill provides worker flexibility, and that it forbids employer coercion—but I’m still unconvinced that if these changes were to take place workers would have MORE power rather than less.”

From what I had hear, the *workers* don’t get to swap anything; the *employer* gets to swap things, at their convenience. And it’s not like we’ve never heard of employees not being able to take all of their paid vacation, is it?Report

I am of the mind that Perry should leave flagship schools like Texas and A&M alone, but beyond that I support his endeavor. His embrace is WGU is quite encouraging. Providing a low-cost, parallel opportunity system strikes me as a great idea.

Leave Very High Research institutions alone (UT, A&M, Texas Tech, Houston), and maybe High Research (North Texas, UTEP, etc.), but focus a lot of the other schools on innovating ways to save money. That’s Texas, though most states have a corresponding range of schools (even Idaho UI vs. Idaho State, and Idaho only has four universities).Report

“He argues that professors concentrate too much on research and writing books, and the reformist solution is to essentially turn Texas’s universities into the kind of super star community colleges where many professors would not be tenured or necessarily even full-time. They’d be experts working in their industries and they’d be paid for how much money they brought into the university and how many students they taught.”

That sounds pretty scary. I mean, the devil is in the details. Maybe the actual policy won’t be so bad. But it sounds to me like a way to destroy a lot of academic research and teaching.

If X teaches the students in a crappier way that spends less time with each student, X can easily teach more students. So there is an economic incentive to teach crappily.

And if Y has to be a researcher who also works in industry, the research that is produced will be thoroughly corrupted. The value of universities (outside of teaching) is that the research (and art and literature) that they produce is not determined by what the market or what people want. This frees researchers up to be more creative and do what they think is best instead of what some business or group of folks (who know less than the researcher) want to be researched.

And I think you are underestimating the value of research done at a lot of mid-level state schools. Even my proposal on this thread endangers a lot of valuable research by taking away lab time and sabattical space. My proposal would need to be ameliorated in that effect by being contemporaneous with large new amounts of federal gov’t spending on NIH, NSF, NEH, etc grants for academics and new federally funded laboratories.Report

To the extent that the research needs to be done, it might be worthwhile to roll those up into other universities and make a clearer distinction between “research university” (with more research for those) and “not research university” rather than the seeming desire of so many universities to be research universities. As with athletics and facilities, it seems to me that this is a part of the rat race.

But my opinions on the research end aren’t actually all that strong. I’d just like to there to be more universities that focus on teaching and keeping teaching affordable rather than (to stick with Texas) Midwestern State wanting to become Texas State State wanting to become North Texas wanting to become the University of Houston wanting to become UT.Report

In terms of tier 1 universities UT offers enormous value for its tuition rate. That value is steadily being diminished by constant budget cuts impacting ourability to retain and recruit top talent and the constant cry by the regents (Perry appointees) to make the students shell out more cash.Report

It's funny how browsers I think are a thing (specifically Vivaldi and Brave) don't even register on this list. Goes to show my techie bubble.

Browsers used to have better names. Netscape was brilliant. What the heck is a Firefox? (It's "Firebird" with IP considerations is what it is.) Chrome? Edge? Edge? Come on.

It's amazing how quickly Chrome accomplished what Firefox never did. It just goes to show the power of corporate muscle. When Google announced they were creating a browser I thought it was kind of dumb. I was wrong.

People say Firefox is better than Chrome now but I just can't get into the groove of it. Chrome doesn't work right on one of my computers and I use Firefox on it. it's passable, but I wish Chrome worked on it.

With Internet Explorer being replaced by Edge and Edge being Chrome-based, that means may be looking at 3 of the top 5 and 85% of desktop browsing occurring through Chromium browsers. That's concerning.

The ship's presence, he speculated, might have been related to the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

Did Trump tweet anything about this, you ask?

The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia. We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian “Skyfall” explosion has people worried about the air around the facility, and far beyond. Not good!

As some of you know, I lost my father two weeks ago. My mother called me that Friday afternoon and said, in not such direct words, that “you better try to get up here if you can.”

I did, but I was too late. But in the aftermath of it, it was good to be there. My mother and I ate together for two weeks (my brother and his family are coming in later, such are the vagaries of scheduling bereavement leave in a government agency). We cooked some favorite things. My mom roasted a chicken and then laughed ruefully and said “I guess it’ll be harder to use a whole one up now” and the day after that, we made a favorite chicken enchilada recipe given us by a former minister of her church who had lived in the Southwest. And she baked a favorite cake of ours (my father was diabetic and we had to be careful about sweets in the house, and also baking was hard while he was so unwell). I think it helped, maybe?

There’s a German word, Kummerspeck, which literally means “Grief-bacon” and is used to refer to the weight you put on while grieving. I had scoffed at that before because the more minor griefs (eg., breakups) I had suffered made me NOT want to eat…..but I know I’ve put on a couple pounds in the last two weeks and will have to explain to my doctor when I go in for my checkup on Tuesday….

And people brought in food – lasagna, and bread, and other things.

And we went out to eat lunch a couple times; before my father’s health failed so much going out to restaurants was a favorite thing and my mom hadn’t been able to do it, really, for six months or more while he was needing her care.

When I spoke to her today after I got home, she noted that even though she had told the ‘church ladies’ who do bereavement lunches she didn’t want them to go to the trouble for the memorial service this fall (we have some people with some specific dietary concerns coming), someone did call her back and suggest a dessert-and-coffee reception before the service and I urged her to have them do that – I have fixed things many times for funeral lunches at my own church and it feels very much like it’s one kindness I can do for the family, and having a piece of cake or a few cookies may make small talk easier in a time when it’s going to be hard.

I admit I always rolled my eyes over the “how to relate to your weird dumb relative who isn’t like you” pieces, or, worse, the “you should refuse to spend time with them or try to harangue them into your viewpoint over the Thanksgiving table” pieces, because my family has a lot of….different…..people in it, and we’ve always managed. You talk about other stuff, that’s all. You talk about how a favorite team is doing or the funny things someone’s kids are doing or you share memories….

Jeffrey Epstein, the millionaire financier and accused sex trafficker, is dead by suicide, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

The officials told NBC News he was found at 7:30 a.m. ET at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York and that he hanged himself.

Epstein accuser claims she was ordered to have sex with prominent men

He was transported Saturday morning from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to a hospital in Lower Manhattan. Upon arrival, he was in cardiac arrest, people familiar with the matter say.

Epstein, 66, was being held on federal sex trafficking charges.

He was arrested July 6 in Teterboro, New Jersey, as he returned from Paris on a private jet.

He had pleaded not guilty and was denied bail.

The indictment on his case showed that he sought out minors, some as young as 14, from at least 2002 through 2005 and paying them hundreds of dollars in cash for sex at either his Manhattan townhouse or his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, federal prosecutors revealed last month.

Epstein was charged with one count of sex trafficking conspiracy and one count of sex trafficking. He faced up to 45 years in prison if found guilty.